leafar

Collaborative Micro-Filtering

Joshua Porter wrote a great post on circles of relationship a few days ago. It has generated many great responses and a new post that summarize all these contributions. Since it's a subject we have been working on with my partner, i would like to share a very concrete approach of it : U.[lik]

First let's have a look at the circles evolution from Ben Schneiderman (via Joshua) to People like us from Alex Mather:

The Schneiderman representation is clearly a pure social approach.

Alex Mather one is a pure Social Network approach mainly focus on the 18-30 years old group. According to him there are two main points that organize the circles:

1. Self, Friends, and “Those Like Us” are in a protected area.
2. Friends and even “Those Like Us” are more important than Family!!!

--> I agree at 100% !

The next step is from Sarah Cooper (Visual designer at yahoo) who introduces the idea of Collaborative Micro-Filtering. She has designed a quick demo of what it should look like. She also tries to build the specs for such a service.

The whole idea is to be able to get the right recommendation by using the right people for each different subject.
Her mom & danna for clothing & Joel, jim and rashid for movies. --> Again I agree @ 100%.

That's exactly these kinds of ideas that we have been working on over the last 2 years.

Limitations of implicit recommendation

Implicite recommendation have a lot of advantages ... mainly it's effortless !
But  it alsa have many problems. The list is quite long but it could be sum up with "making mistakes".
That's something user would not accept especially if it's a mistake that a five year old boy wouldn't have made. It's a bit like, in the old days, altavista not finding its own website when asked.

This is just an example from Duke about amazon.com. I told you a few days ago that he is making a huge digging on the recommendation. Take a look at the comment on flickr from where the photo is originated.

Everything is miscellaneous... that's for sure !

This guy is mad ... but he has great slides and examples. "Carve nature at its joints. [...] butchering an animal is a brilliant metaphore [...] Good butcher knows where the natural places to divide the world up are."

--> David Weinberger

People Inside.

Thanks Stan.
I'll never have thought that I would end up in a blogroll with Avc & Chris let alone being just below Apophenia & Fractal of changes (hope they will join lijit quickly).

I am very happy we could work together on People Inside (I think it's even better than People ready ;-))

• Lijit & you for the search.
• U-lik and us for the discovery.

PS: for the european companies you should add, you could start with cocoment, Xing & viadeo (i'll work on a longer list very quickly).

Chris Anderson's Hall of Fame

Chris Anderson from The long tail has published it's five most disruptive business books ... describe as "This is sort of a Hall of Fame selection". Here is the list with links to U-lik's clubs :

1. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World
2. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution In Economics And Technology
3. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
4. Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
5. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual

For each book he explains why it's a must read ...  why it's a Hall Of a Fame book !

This is the video U-lik found me when i entered a bunch of them in the database (I share K.Dick & Borges with this guy & I am very interested by this book). I will probably do the same for me as soon as I can.

The Next Web ... Awards

We haven't been selected for the NextWeb Awards ... Dam!
But here is my selection, it funny because it actually say something about your web vision (like Patrick de Laive's one). It was difficult and I probably would have needed one or two more spaces ... but it's fun.

You can vote here.

Google & personalization ... the change in tagline does not change the goal

And Greg linden sums up it right :

By learning from people's past behavior, Google can disambiguate their intent. Different people will see different information based on their needs and preferences. Like the good friend that sends you links that might interest you, Google will adapt to you and help you find what you need.

Even for advertising, personalization can be helpful, targeted efforts to help you find products and services you might actually like rather than spamming mass audiences with annoying and irrelevant crap. As Eric said back in Oct 2005, "Advertising should be interesting, relevant and useful to users."
See also my Nov 2005 post, "Is personalized advertising evil?".

An assonance for Fred

I had a great meeting this morning .. and it seems that it was a mutual feeling.

On my way to Phil's Apero Wireless #2 where i was exploring paths to put our netvibes widget on mobile, I stopped in front of an ad campaign ..... I stopped and took a few seconds to think again about the great meeting I had this morning ... I stopped because Fred talked to me about a tag (another assonance with the folksonomy world with a french touch in it) he used to see near to his home in london.
Fred Graffiti is from Banksy, my pictures are from here.

--> Il y a des jours (et des posts) qui filent la banane !

U-lik is a proud member of Cisco's Human Network

I love the new Cisco advertising campaign : The human Network....

--> so , we are very proud to be a member of the Human Network !

Enjoy the clip and visit our story in the french version of Cisco website. 

Going to thenextweb conference in Amsterdam

An explosive Panel will be waiting for us !
I hope i will get a chance to present U.[lik] , we are in the arena ...
deliberation should be over at the end of the week.